Do startups need lawyers? Absolutely, but not as much as many first-time entrepreneurs think. Lawyers play two important roles for startups. Rules and Risks. 1- Rules. Incorporating your company, taking money from investors, and hiring employees all require compliance with a complex set of laws, codes, and regulations. The key responsibility of a business’ lawyer is to ensure the company...
You have an amazing idea. The most amazing idea of your life. An idea that will change the world. With great reluctance [mistake #1: reluctance] you tell a few trusted friends, all of whom say something between “maybe” and “nice idea”. You take all that as feedback that you are on the right track [mistake #2: happy ears]. You dip your toe into market research, and...
Most people follow a century-old paradigm of philanthropy, popularized by Andrew Carnegie back at the turn of the 20th Century. Simply put, maximize the return of investments, and give a portion of those earning to charity. In Carnegie’s case, those investments provided him so much wealth, that despite giving away an equivalent of $5 billion in his two decades as philanthropist, enough of his...
Continuing the discussion of early-stage investing, a common thought circling around the venture capital community is that their the traditional investment model is broken. In “Investing without Zombies”, I focused on the odd choice of optimizing the system for the least likely case. But there is a second flaw in that system as well. Exits. Traditional equity investments are worthless until a...
